Methodology: I used a number of sources to
identify a player's numbers and his statistics.
For statistics, I used the following resources.
1.
Tod Maher and Mark Speck's book: "World Football
League Encyclopedia." This is an excellent book.
2. Media Guides
3. Some players played in the NFL. Their stats are
from
http://www.pro-football-reference.com/
For players numbers I used the following resources in descending
order of priority.
1. Home team's programs-My assumption is the home team is pretty
reliable on it's own roster. Hopefully that's not a false
assumption.
2. Media guide-I used these mainly for players who were on the
roster, but didn't make it into a game. They are not that
reliable for general numbers. Media guides were put out
before the season. As players got cut, players would
switch to their number.
3. Road programs-Road programs in the early years of the league
were prone to misspellings and number errors.
4. Tod Maher
and Mark Speck's book: "World Football League
Encyclopedia."
5. Photographs-This is a chicken and egg problem. You need to
know the number to identify the player. You also need to
know the jersey style to accurately identify the year.
Over time you recognize both and can be reasonably accurate.
Sometimes a player wore 2 different numbers in a year, such as
Mike Yancheff in 1974 In that case, I separate the
numbers with a comma, e.g. "10,12." It was not uncommon for
a player to really have 2 numbers in a year. However, my sense is
most of the times it is a bookkeeping error and not a real
number change. One of the two numbers is right. |